I wouldn't switch off AA unless you were desperate. Not everyone would like their character looking like a pixilated sprite for a minute improvement in performance. Shadows are a good suggestion though. I usually don't like how they get rendered anyway.

I don't think AA is working correctly with ARR anyway. Can you tell the difference? I can't. Both have jaggies on the neck and around the ears.

AA as it exists in the benchmark(at least in the 'creation' version) is only FXAA. It's a minor increase that has a very minor impact on performance based on the hardware you have. Switching this off will give only a very minor drop in quality and even smaller increase in performance.

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Rinsui wrote:

Only hips + boobs all day and hips + boobs all over my icecream

HaibaneRenmei wrote:

30 bucks is almost free

cocodojo wrote:

Its personal preference and all, but yes we need to educate WoW players that this is OUR game, these are Characters and not Toons. Time to beat that into them one at a time.

I did find a bizarre way to improve your score: (no word of a lie) using a lalafell will raise your score better any other race (less to render = better score). It's not by much, but if every point counts, this who you'll want to test with.

I did find a bizarre way to improve your score: (no word of a lie) using a lalafell will raise your score better any other race (less to render = better score). It's not by much, but if every point counts, this who you'll want to test with.

Edit: I'm a computer dummy. Do you think the game will look better on my PC or PS3?

Register for open beta and try them both and you can get a better idea for free. Just guessing, probably pretty close to the same performance.

FWIW switching between two computers and PS3 during the Beta 3 period my impression was that PS3 didn't look as sharp, but was tuned to run very smoothly. Part of this may be the HD resolution of 1080 lines on the PS3 vs ~1400 on the computers. Plus newer graphics cards just perform better than the PS3 hardware so SE may have reduced some settings in software for PS3. I enjoyed both platforms though, for different reasons. Playing FFXIV ARR in the living room on the comfort of a couch was kinda nice.

As for the desktops, my fiancée's machine ran Beta 3 really well. Mine struggled with low frame rate and loooong loading times, she only took a few seconds between zones while I could go get a pizza & beer while changing areas. I replaced my AMD 4400 with a new i5 computer and moved all my good internal components over. Also installed a Vector SSD to run the game off of, hopefully that will help with loading times on my machine. Benchmark test on max settings:

FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn Official Benchmark (Character Creation) Tested on:8/4/2013 11:40:53 AM Score:5556 Average Framerate:46.311 Performance:Very High -Easily capable of running the game. Should perform exceptionally well, even at higher resolutions.

FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn Official Benchmark (Character Creation) Tested on:05/08/2013 00:17:10 Score:10741 Average Framerate:97.417 Performance:Extremely High -Easily capable of running the game on the highest settings.

So they must've done some optimization between the last benchmark and now. I'm pretty sure I just squeaked in over 7000 before... and now...

FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn Official Benchmark (Character Creation) Tested on:8/4/2013 7:17:49 PM Score:9089 Average Framerate:79.678 Performance:Extremely High -Easily capable of running the game on the highest settings.

Significantly higher than last run and I didn't upgrade. They definitely improved something. Had some issues with the tearing with the first benchmark, but now they're gone.

Performance and quality are inversely proportional when it comes to graphics in games. Generally speaking, if a benchmark is performing better with no upgrades to equipment or changes in settings, they reduced the quality of the images. You can actually see that in the side-by-side comparison of the older and newer benchmarks. I'm kinda on the fence about the changes.

It remains to be seen whether or not it carries over to the launch version of the game. If they do I'll be happy that people with NQ PCs will be able to run the game at medium to high settings, but a bit disappointed 'eye candy mode' won't be as good as it could be. It's probably better for the game that they did reduce the entry barrier of having higher tier CPU/GPU for PC players though.

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Rinsui wrote:

Only hips + boobs all day and hips + boobs all over my icecream

HaibaneRenmei wrote:

30 bucks is almost free

cocodojo wrote:

Its personal preference and all, but yes we need to educate WoW players that this is OUR game, these are Characters and not Toons. Time to beat that into them one at a time.

Significantly higher than last run and I didn't upgrade. They definitely improved something. Had some issues with the tearing with the first benchmark, but now they're gone.

Performance and quality are inversely proportional when it comes to graphics in games. Generally speaking, if a benchmark is performing better with no upgrades to equipment or changes in settings, they reduced the quality of the images. You can actually see that in the side-by-side comparison of the older and newer benchmarks. I'm kinda on the fence about the changes.

It remains to be seen whether or not it carries over to the launch version of the game. If they do I'll be happy that people with NQ PCs will be able to run the game at medium to high settings, but a bit disappointed 'eye candy mode' won't be as good as it could be. It's probably better for the game that they did reduce the entry barrier of having higher tier CPU/GPU for PC players though.

I suppose so. You sure know how to make me sad about the good things in life. THANKS FILTH. But maybe there's a chance we'll have the best of both worlds? And I'm not prepared enough to run both benchmarks at the same time.

I had my girlfriend run the game on her laptop and it scored pretty well. So I'm excited. (She also has a PS3 now to play it too.) THIS BETTER BE FOR REAL!

Significantly higher than last run and I didn't upgrade. They definitely improved something. Had some issues with the tearing with the first benchmark, but now they're gone.

Performance and quality are inversely proportional when it comes to graphics in games. Generally speaking, if a benchmark is performing better with no upgrades to equipment or changes in settings, they reduced the quality of the images.

The score is an arbitrary score. It doesn't measure an exact unit of anything; it's just a guideline so that when application completes the evaluation, the score can tell you whether your computer can run the game well or not. For one thing, the second benchmark might have evaluated its score on different criteria than the first. You can't consider the score to be consistent between benchmarks let alone conclude that the quality of the images must have dropped.

I suppose so. You sure know how to make me sad about the good things in life. THANKS FILTH. But maybe there's a chance we'll have the best of both worlds? And I'm not prepared enough to run both benchmarks at the same time.

I had my girlfriend run the game on her laptop and it scored pretty well. So I'm excited. (She also has a PS3 now to play it too.) THIS BETTER BE FOR REAL!

You should be happy that this game doesn't require the power it once did. Do you remember the original, original benchmark? I had a monumental score on that with a pair of GTX 480s. Granted SLI wasn't supported, but I used the second GPU solely for AA. That translated into barely being able to maintain 30 FPS in congested areas. Now people with middle of the road GPUs can run at higher than usual settings and high resolution. That should make you happy.

Xoie wrote:

The score is an arbitrary score. It doesn't measure an exact unit of anything; it's just a guideline so that when application completes the evaluation, the score can tell you whether your computer can run the game well or not. For one thing, the second benchmark might have evaluated its score on different criteria than the first. You can't consider the score to be consistent between benchmarks let alone conclude that the quality of the images must have dropped.

Not really. Hear me out...

SE via Official Benchmark Homepage wrote:

Depending on your system’s resident software and hardware, it is possible that FINAL FANTASY XIV: A Realm Reborn may not run optimally, even if your computer meets the minimum system requirements. We therefore recommend using this benchmark software to check your system before purchasing the product.

Now I understand that it's just a rough guideline, but people are expected to use this as a tool to understand how well their hardware will perform when actually running the software. It doesn't make sense to me(nor should it to anyone) that the exact same setups are scoring higher unless SE expects that hardware to perform better than they initially thought it would. There could be several explanations for this or there could be none. It's possible that the benchmark is about as useful(read: useless) as the benchmark for 1.0 was.

I'd like to trust that they're doing everything in their power to get it right this time. The only options I see here are that they overshot their mark and the benchmark was too demanding or they nerfed the graphics down so that the same hardware would get better performance. Given the obvious differences between the world exploration and character creation versions of the benchmark, it seems much more likely to be the latter.

That said, none of this really matters to me if they can produce a Final Fantasy with the story and gameplay we all expect know they're capable of. If it's fun to play, I don't care if it looks 8-bit.

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Rinsui wrote:

Only hips + boobs all day and hips + boobs all over my icecream

HaibaneRenmei wrote:

30 bucks is almost free

cocodojo wrote:

Its personal preference and all, but yes we need to educate WoW players that this is OUR game, these are Characters and not Toons. Time to beat that into them one at a time.

Your video card is quite old. While the 9800 was a beast, current cards wreck it.

What would you suggest i look to get?

It depends what your system and budget can handle. Depending on how strong your power supply is, you may have to replace that too when you upgrade your graphics card.

You'll have to do some research to figure that out, power supply calculators aren't that difficult to find (though some are more detailed than they need to be), just remember that whatever your power supply says it provides, count on about 80% of that and adjust your math accordingly.

As for graphics cards, I love my GTX 670, but that's a pricey card. A 660 or 660Ti would probably be perfectly acceptable.

And before someone says it, yeah I prefer nVidia cards. No there's no particularly good reason for that.

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svlyons wrote:

If random outcomes aren't acceptable to you, then don't play with random people.

If anyone is feeling generous enough, could I ask someone to build me a decent computer, in the $1000-1500 range? can either post it in here or just PM me a link to what you have for ideas. Thats one area I am not very fluent on is building computers and matching stuff together. Don't need any monitors.

Not 100% positive if this link will take you to the exact build or not, but here's a system I was toying around with on ibuypower just for fun. For reference, I bought a comp from them 3 years ago, it runs fantastic, still scored almost 10k on the benchmark, and was an incredible bargain. I highly reccommend them.